Women's History: The Pendulum Swings

Recently in my Role of Women class we had guest speaker Dr. Barry Jones, who teaches at DTS and serves on the preaching team at Irving Bible Church. He shared with our group the process of how his church moved toward a stronger affirmation of women’s public ministry and what they learned—pro and con—in the process.As part of our discussion, he provided some historical information from Women, Ministry, and The Gospel, by Tim Larson at Wheaton. He showed how at the time of first-wave feminism, the church was more committed to gender equality than the culture at large. People such as John Wesley, George Whitfield, D. L. Moody, A. J. Gordon [Gordon College/Gordon-Conwell], A. B. Simpson and John Roach Stranton all affirmed women’s public teaching ministries. Even the wife of conservative W. A. Criswell, architect of the conservative resurgence in the Southern Baptist Church, spent years of Sundays teaching a mixed-gender Sunday school class for several hundred people. (I remember a time when I could hear her teaching that class on the radio.)So, what happened? Why did the pendulum swing back toward limiting women’s public speaking in the church? Dr. Jones offered three reasons:. Men returned from war. Post-WWII, men displaced women as they returned from combat and wanted their factory jobs back. The culture at large saw the need to re-establish the role of men, and part of the accompanying dogma was that a women’s “place” is in the home. I would add to this the influence of Sigmund Freud. The concept of “penis envy” was applied to women who liked their jobs and wanted to keep them. Such women were told that they were not fully sexualized, and their desire to work demonstrated something amiss in their sexual development.. Second-wave feminism. Once women gained the right to vote, the movement had splintered, as people differed on what to do next about injustices to women. Should they fight for literacy? Go after equal pay? Some in the movement saw reproductive rights as the next step. The church reacted, and we see this reflected in more conservative translations of the Bible (compare the KJV’s 1611 translation of 1 Tim 2 with later translations), and with a push toward more of a one-size-fits-all view of masculinity and femininity.. Twentieth-century Pentecostalism. Pentecostalism, born as a movement in 1901, had made great gains worldwide, and conservatives reacted. The result was a marked difference in how scholars viewed various forms of the word “prophesy.” Since some of the “woman” texts in the New Testament contain this word, a more conservative view meant less freedom for women to impart content in public settings.